Many Wake high schoolers are now back on campus for the first time in nearly a year
For the first time in 11 months, every Wake County school building is now open and offering in-person instruction.
Thousands of Wake County traditional-calendar students returned to campus on Wednesday, joining year-round and modified-calendar students who came back on Monday. It was the first day of in-person classes since late December for elementary and middle school students and the first day of face-to-face classes since March 2020 for high school students.
“Look at the children,” Dana King, principal of Millbrook High School in Raleigh, said in an interview Wednesday. “Look how happy they seem. I’m doing check-ins with staff and the students. They were all so desperate to get back here.
“I keep reminding them it’s not the school that they knew, but we’ve got this and we’re going to be fine.”
As part of this pandemic world, students and staff have to pass daily temperature checks and answer health questions before they’re allowed in the building. They have to wear face coverings in an environment where hugs, handshakes and other forms of physical contact are out to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19.
Students are now eating lunches in silence, either in the cafeteria or their classrooms.
“It was exciting to see the kids walk in the halls and trying their best to get to their classrooms,” Michele Jones, a math teacher at Millbrook, said in an interview. “The kids are very quiet. They seem to feel like it’s very different and it’s not the same as what they’re used to.”
The students who arrived at Millbrook on Wednesday were met by Cierra Gilliam and other student government leaders who held welcome signs and cheered on their classmates.
“It’s definitely not what we’re used to having,” Gilliam, 18, the student body president, said in an interview. “But I think at this point everybody is willing to be responsible and accept that this is the new normal for now.
“As long as we can get some sense of normalcy back and get on track to being normal completely, then I feel like everybody is willing to work and compromise.”
Wake students return
Wednesday was a long time coming for the Wake County school system since schools were initially closed for in-person instruction in mid-March.
Wake elementary and middle school students began returning in late October for in-person classes before the district switched back to all-remote learning in January and the first half of February.
PreK-3 and K-12 special education students in regional programs are back to receiving daily classes. But all other grade levels are on a rotation of one week of in-person classes and two weeks of online classes to reduce class sizes to maintain social distancing.
Slightly more than half of Wake’s 161,000 students will take in-person classes this semester. The rest are in the district’s Virtual Academy program.
Wake, which is North Carolina’s largest school district, brought students back ahead of a bill passed Wednesday by the state legislature that requires school districts to offer in-person instruction. Gov. Roy Cooper has indicated he won’t sign the bill, saying he’s concerned it lacks health safeguards.
Classes will be different
Some of the reasons cited for resuming in-person classes include how students have been having academic, social and emotional issues while getting only online instruction.
Wake County, like school districts across the nation, has seen grades drop and absences rise during remote learning.
“There is no doubt whatsoever that it’s been incredibly emotionally hard on the students,” Brynn Cartier, an English teacher at Millbrook, said in an interview. “As much as they want to come back, there’s a lot of mixed emotions.
“Some are really excited and some are kind of nervous. But overall I think that most of them want to be back and I think that has been just really hard for them.”
Cartier said it was a challenge trying to keep some of her online students engaged. It will become even more challenging for Cartier and other teachers who will now be expected to simultaneously teach in-person students and online students.
“It’s going to be important that the students that are still online and at home are being taught in the same capacity that the students that are actually in school and learning are being taught,” Cartier said. “Making sure that we’re balancing that is going to be a challenge for sure.”
The difficulties teaching both groups of students at the same time is one of the reasons the school board voted Tuesday to add additional asynchronous learning days to the spring semester. There won’t be in-person classes or live online classes those days.
It’s not going to be easy though having to keep her distance from her students, according to Jones, the math teacher.
“It’s going to be a lot of getting used to with me not getting to go to their desk and giving stickers whenever they do something right,” Jones said. “Or when they practice a problem, run over to their desk to lean over. I’m a little cautious with that.”
This story was originally published February 17, 2021 at 10:00 AM.
